This is a legacy website featuring a collection of work by the Carnegie Endowment’s global network of scholars on topics including Russia, Ukraine, Eurasia, and the post-Soviet states. This site is a product of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace based in Washington, D.C. For more recent work by Carnegie scholars in this field, please visit Carnegie Politika.
After abandoning the Soviet Union, Russia prolonged and reproduced the same basic system, but without communism. In comparison, Ukraine is on the positive side of the process of taking shape as a state and a nation.
Russia and the European Union are competing intensely for influence in Ukraine, Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and other countries.
From Vladimir Putin’s perspective, U.S. policies in the Middle East since the beginning of the Arab Awakening have been misguided, unprincipled, and dangerous, and Washington’s record of prognostication and intervention has been abysmal.
The Kremlin appears to have found its distinct international role. It is based on conservative nationalism; support for traditional international law with its emphasis on national sovereignty and non-interference in internal affairs of states; and a strong preference for evolutionary path of development over revolutionary upheavals.
It is time to recognize the security threat that corruption overseas poses to U.S. interests and begin taking it seriously at the level of high politics.
Snowden did not create the security-privacy dilemma, but he did illuminate a deeply rooted problem that Western leaders have long tried to obscure.
While the world waits for a Fourth Wave of Democracy, it is witnessing a diametrically different phenomenon: a surge of new authoritarianism.
Shifts in Russia’s foreign policy following Putin’s return to power result from significant changes in the country’s domestic situation and a shifting global environment.
The Russian and Chinese states are trying to use Snowden, as well as Assange, to discredit liberal democracies—above all, the United States. The Kremlin also sees the Snowden case as a way to crack down on democratic freedoms inside of Russia.
The causes and nature of the Russian and Turkish protests, as well as the respective regimes’ reactions to them, are strikingly similar.